you. Are you doing anything dangerous?”
“No,” he lied. “Inspector Rostnikov …?”
“Take care of yourself,” she said, looking down at her work and ending the conversation.
“You, too,” he said, taking a step back.
“Of course. Who will if I don’t?”
With that Sasha made his escape, vowing never again to visit his mother at work.
He made it back to the square a few minutes before noon and found that Sonia had sold most of her flowers. She smiled up at him. Her teeth, he noticed, were remarkably white and even.
“You brought your flowers home?” she asked, pushing her cart toward him. “How did your wife like them?”
“I gave them to my mother,” he said, falling into step beside her.
“You want another bunch for your wife?” Sonia asked.
“Perhaps, after I see your father,” he said.
“Is your wife pretty?” Sonia asked, maneuvering her cart down a curb.
“Yes,” he said.
“Of course,” Sonia said with a laugh, dodging behind a car, the wheels of the cart clattering. “A pretty policeman would have a pretty wife. Nothing else would make sense.”
“You’re sure your father will be home?” he asked.
“He’ll be home,” she said. “But he’ll be leaving for work soon. Maybe you and I can talk a bit then. I can tell you more about Kotsis. And other things. Sasha and Sonia.”
She moved quickly, and he had to hurry to keep up with her.
“Is it far?” he asked.
A barrel of a man stepped back awkwardly to avoid the momentum of the flower cart.
“Not far,” she said. “Right down this way.”
“Can we move a bit slower?” Sasha said. “I don’t want to arrest you for dangerous driving.”
Sonia slowed down.
“Better?” she asked.
“Better,” he said.
She took his arm and pushed the cart expertly with one hand. Sasha did not pull away.
“Right over there,” she said, pointing to a small, slightly run-down ancient building that had managed to escape the demolition and rebuilding of the 1950s. She opened the door with a key and maneuvered the cart through expertly, though it looked to Sasha as if there was no room to do so. There was almost no light in the alcove in which Sasha found himself. He could barely see the outline of the flower cart as Sonia pushed it into a corner.
“This way,” she said, taking his hand and pushing open a door.
Her hand was warm and rough and not at all unpleasant.
There was a bit more light on the stairway she led him up. A solitary small and dirty window on the landing above them allowed them to see the worn-down wooden stairs. On the second floor, Sonia tugged him to the left.
“Right here,” she said. She let go of his hand, inserted her key in the lock, and opened the door.
Sasha stepped into the small room behind her. There were a few pieces of old furniture, a worn sofa, a table with three chairs, a lamp, and a dresser with a radio atop it. A small rug hid few of the stains on the dirty floor. Sonia closed the door and called out, “Father, we’re here!”
A man came through the door to the right, a somber man in dark pants, a flannel shirt, and a blue jacket. In his right hand he held a pistol, which he aimed directly at Sasha Tkach’s chest.
“This is my father, Sasha,” Sonia said. “Peotor Kotsis.”
TWELVE
Emil Karpo had six officially active cases to deal with. He also had 604 officially inactive cases to deal with. The 604 cases on which he kept records in black notebooks on the shelves in his small room were those that had been placed in the inactive files of the Procurator’s Office and the MVD. Only twenty-three of these cases had been assigned originally to Karpo. In the past fourteen years Emil Karpo had brought sixteen of those cases to satisfactory conclusions either by apprehending the lawbreaker or by discovering that those responsible were dead or had left the country.
Emil Karpo’s evenings were spent updating his records of those cases and conducting his investigations. His holidays were spent following leads, sometimes leads on cases fifteen or twenty years old. The oldest case in Emil Karpo’s file involved the murder of a doctor on the Fili Metro platform twenty-nine years earlier.
Of the current cases to which he had been assigned, he was most confident that he could and would locate those responsible for kidnapping pets, particularly cats in the housing complexes near the airport. He was making a slow deliberate investigation of both government-authorized and black market sausage and ground-meat distributors. The operation was too big and too much in need of distributors to keep quiet. The crimes that were most difficult to deal with were those that involved apparently random acts of violence by individuals against others they did not know. When the perpetrator simply acted once and receded and no witnesses were present, it was almost impossible to deal with. Like the person who killed the doctor on the Metro platform. Almost impossible.
What Karpo really wanted to do was deal with Yuri Vostoyavek and Jalna Morchov, and he would have done so if he knew where the boy was. Karpo had waited for Yuri outside the apartment where he lived, but the boy had not come out. His mother had emerged around eight, hurrying to catch a bus, but by nine Yuri was not down. Perhaps he had been too frightened by Karpo to get up and go to work. This Karpo doubted. Karpo had, in fact, admired the boy’s reaction to his intrusion.
A few minutes after nine, Karpo had climbed the stairs and knocked at the door to the Vostoyavek apartment. There was no answer. He had used his identity card to open the door and found the apartment empty. The conclusion was simple: Expecting to be followed, the boy had gotten out through an alternate exit.
After concluding that Yuri had not gone to work, Karpo had gone to his desk at Petrovka and called the dacha of Andrei Morchov. The girl, Jalna, answered the phone. Her “Yes, who is it?” had held a challenge.
“Comrade Morchov, please,” he said.
“He just left,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said and hung up.
The next step was obvious: Karpo rose, signed out on the board near the sixth-floor exit, and went out in search of Andrei Morchov.
“Policeman,” Peotor Kotsis said, shaking his head, “you are an annoyance”
Sonia moved behind Sasha and quickly, efficiently searched him, finding his pistol and pulling it out with a satisfied, “Uh.”
She displayed it to her father, who nodded his approval and pointed to the table. Sonia bounced over and placed the weapon gently next to a steaming cup of liquid.
“Sit, policeman,” Kotsis said, pointing to the sofa with his gun. Sasha moved to the sofa and sat.
Sonia sat at the table, put her finger in the barrel of Sasha’s gun, and spun it gently as she sipped the hot liquid.
“Sonia and Sasha,” she said with a smile, and Sasha concluded that the lovely young woman was more than a bit mad.
“The old man,” Sasha said.
“Yes,” agreed Kotsis. “The old man. The woman at the center. You have, as others before you have done for two centuries, underestimated the determination of the Turkistani. You have been, as the Americans used to say and the French continue to say in their pale imitations of old movies, set up.”
“Why?” asked Sasha.
“Hostage,” said Sonia.
